Charming Quirks Digitized

I am going to use my project from Andrea's Brush Lettering tutorial for digitizing. You can see my preparation there. Here is my final result from that tutorial:

Although I was satisfied with this for a first project using brush lettering, there were things I wanted to change, and I decided to see whether it is possible to do this in Affinity Photo. I don't own Photoshop. I am thrilled with the changes I was able to make. It was easy to adjust the baseline and height of the letters in 'QUIRKS', and to change the slant of a letter. I even changed serifs, changed the kerning of 'QUIRKS', and reduced the size of that word slightly to better balance with 'charming'. Tidying the edges of letters was time-consuming but effective.

The phrase comes from The Charming Quirks of Others, the title of a book by Alexander McCall Smith, one of my favourite authors. I looked for photos of fingerprints, since I thought the lines and whorls of a fingerprint would carry through the idea of quirks, and the individuality of a fingerprint would be a reminder that each person is unique and valuable.

Here are black and sepia versions using a photo from Pixabay:

Here are three versions using a photo from PhotoPin:

In each case I placed a partially transparent pale yellow layer between the photo layer and the text layer so I could try different Effects. As I expected, the Effects are much more exciting with the PhotoPin photo, but I like the quiet retro results with the PixaBay photo too. The text fits beautifully within the Pixabay photo, and the paper on which the fingerprint was made is very attractive. The text layer is somewhat transparent in all the examples to let the photo show through, but this may not be obvious at the scale used here.

It is hard to decide which to use for the cover photo since I like all of them for different reasons, but for now I will go with the sepia. Which do you like best?